Practice Makes Possible

Whenever someone tells me that they are trying hard to overcome their anxiety, my response is always the same; please don’t. What kind of crazy advice is that to someone fighting a constant battle against crippling anxiety! Actually, not as stupid as it sounds. If you try to do something there are two possible outcomes. You may succeed or you may fail. Whilst we love to succeed, the prospect of failing is not a good feeling. It arouses a degree of anxiety in us as we approach the task, whatever it may be. But isn’t anxiety just what we want to avoid? Look at it another way; if you want to confront your anxiety and overcome it, then you have to use the only mechanism that your body/mind has for the task - the fight or flight mechanism, which is where the physiological sensations of anxiety come from in the first place. Let’s spend a bit more time with the plank. It can teach us a lot. The plank is not a threat in itself, although we may create a threat around it. If you can easily walk along it when it’s on the floor, you could in theory walk along it just as easily when it’s thirty feet off the ground. Except that most people can’t. What stops them is their imagination. They picture themselves falling off and breaking a leg, or worse. That picture in their mind’s eye is what stops them from simply strolling along it. In the same way, what confronts you in particular situations is a self-generated image of you not being able to do it without feeling awful and having to run away from it. So when I say, please don’t try to overcome your anxiety or cope with your anxiety it’s because I want to suggest a better way. Why should you have to live your life with an undercurrent of anxiety that you somehow manage to control? There was a book written a few years ago entitled “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway”. Wrong!!! Far better to get rid of the anxiety in the first place; you don’t need it. It’s a product of your imagination. Unwittingly, you created it. You can discard it. How? By practice. So you take a walk along a plank on the ground. You are probably a little careful because you’re not sure that you will place your feet absolutely correctly. So walk along it again… and again… and again, until you’re doing it without thinking. Now we’ll put it on two bricks. You show a little caution the first time; you could lose your footing. So do it again, over and over until it’s boring, and it’s time to put it between two chairs and start practising walking along it properly off the ground. Then, if you wish, prop it on two stepladders like painters and decorators often do and practise walking along with confidence. You too could be a steel erector, trotting along girders a hundred feet off the ground. There’s another advantage to practising. It doesn’t involve success and failure - as long as you don’t do something silly like turning it into a challenge. “I’m going to walk this plank fifty times and then I’ll reward myself with a cup of tea and a biscuit.” Do you see that you’ve just reintroduced the possibility of failure - and the fear that that arouses? No, you practice, that’s all. How long you practice is entirely up to you. Because the benefits are cumulative, 30 seconds of practice is just as valuable as half an hour. Take your time and stay comfortable. The object is to erase the anxiety, not put up with it, and that takes as long as it takes, but it’s worth the wait. I mentioned imagination. That’s what I want to come back to next time.

The Bull And The Plank

A bull is a potentially dangerous animal: a plank is a plank. I saw a photo recently that had been shared on Facebook. It showed a sign on a field gate which read, “Do not enter this field unless you can cross it in eight seconds. The bull can cross it in nine!” A bull which feels that its territory is being invaded can be a very aggressive animal indeed. Given the chance, it will seriously injure you, possibly even kill you. So the sensible walker, faced with a field with a bull in it, looks for an alternative route to crossing the field. The Spanish matador (or to give him his correct title, the torero) on the other hand, deliberately goes into the ring, confronts the bull and in the end, kills it. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work like that; the torero isn’t as careful as he needs to be and is gored by the bull, ending up in hospital or occasionally, in the cemetery. A bull, whether you avoid it or confront it, is a dangerous animal, and you must deal with that fact or risk perishing. A plank, however, is simply a plank, an inanimate object. Planks used to be made of wood. Now increasingly they are made from metal. Apart from that, a plank is a plank is a plank. If I place a standard metal plank, the kind used in scaffolding, on the floor of my office and invite you to walk along it, you can do so easily and without undue concern. If I now place it on two bricks so that it stands a few inches off the floor you can still walk along it easily though you may be a tad more careful. Now, instead, I place it on two chairs; you begin to feel nervous. I take you and the plank outside and have it placed at roof height from the corner of the building to the corner of the next building. Neither you nor I would now risk walking along the plank. Why not? It’s still the same plank that presented no problems on the floor of my office. It is not the plank which changes but our response to the invitation to walk along it. So long as we think that everything will be fine, it is. Once we begin to have doubts, it’s not. And yet we’ve all seen photos from the 1920s showing steel erectors nonchalantly sitting on a metal girder several hundred feet in the air, eating their lunch. They know and have fully assimilated the knowledge that it is the same girder that it was when it was still on the ground. The bull is the one who determines what your experience will be; you are the one who determines what your experience with the plank will be. Where is the relevance of all this? If you suffer anxiety and phobia, the objects of your response are planks, not bulls. Change your attitude to the plank, and your behaviour towards it inevitably changes too. Whereas, no matter how well you convince yourself that a bull is a lovely, gentle, much misunderstood creature who just needs to be shown a little affection, the bull will still kill you if you trespass on its territory.